Yesterday, Deputy NASA Administrator Dava Newman announced with a blog post a new publication by NASA. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but given that one of the authors is Alex McDonald, I expect that it will be very good.
Speaking of which, I’m heading down to San Diego in a few minutes to attend at least the first day of the annual ISS R&D conference. So blogging may be light.
[Update Thursday morning]
I’m back from the conference. Meanwhile, I still haven’t looked at the publication, but Leonard David has.
This is terrible; I’m in shock. She was murdered last night, walking her dogs in her upscale Baltimore neighborhood.
I’ve known her for decades. I just saw her in March, at a NASA-sponsored workshop on space safety that she had put together at RFF. The report is due out any day.
In addition to being a wonderful woman, this is a huge loss to the space community; she was one of the few economists really focusing on the economics of space development. My condolences to her other friends, and family.
As I just noted on Twitter, if Trump picks him, I’d seriously consider voting for him, not least because he would be a vice president more visionary about space than any in history. More anon.
[Update a while later]
Related non-space thoughts on a Gingrich pick from Jonah Goldberg.
Oh, and speaking of insanity on human spaceflight policy, I’d like to fisk this nonsense, but it’s long, and I just don’t have the gumption for it right now. I doubt if many have even read the stupid thing.
Donald Robertson has an op-ed at Space News that reflects many of the themes of my monograph (which, by the way, I have updated with feedback from the past couple days).